You don’t need to be a Nostradamus to forecast that 2019’s business-to-business (B2B) marketing landscape will be emerging with digital trends with a competitive edge, that will be the power engine to the always on world of marketing and pave way for better and more engaging methods to reach prospects and customers.
With plentiful of emerging trends, where precisely should B2B marketers focus their attention to, given the time and resource constraints?
As a modern B2B marketing company we have done our homework and here are some absolutely must not ignore trends.
Intent Data
The ability to predict what your buyers are interested in leveraging intent data will witness a complete transformation in the way leading B2B marketers choose their content, create unique campaigns and engage the buyers.
Intent data gives the marketers an opportunity to explore and understand the buyers’ interests, take those insights as an input to hone the relevance, uniqueness and value of the content served. Use the visibility into a person or company’s online research that comes from both first-party intent data (tracking your website activity and cookie visitor engagement) and third-party intent data (a collection of data from searches on external sites).
Podcasts
Podcasts are one of the most in thing now in a big way. The on-demand and easy to assimilate format make podcasts more relatable and consumable as opposed to other media formats. A well-executed podcast can position your brand value and your firm as an industry expert and enable your marketing efforts in establishing trust and credibility in your domain.
Not only are podcasts cost-effective,serving high-quality content sourced from industry thought leaders, but they also set a cohesive platform to strengthen relationships with strategic accounts. It also provides a channel for you to develop stronger relationships with your ideal clients and potential referral partners by having them as guests on your podcast.
Agile Marketing
More than a trend, Agile Marketing has become the way of modern B2B marketing DNA, a necessary survival skill. Effective project management will be the key to building high-performing and sustainable marketing teams.
Marketers are influenced and motivated more than ever to profess more in limited resources and respond faster than ever to change and they are required to continuously develop new and changing skill sets.
An Agile approach helps marketers not to burnout, achieve critical deadlines and enhance output quality and visibility within processes and outputs.
Agile is a modern approach to incorporate Scrum, Kanban and Lean principles that encourage experimentation and validated learnings in the science of B2B marketing, dividing large goals into short cycle projects, in order to test out minimum viable marketing programs, learn from them, iterate and improve.
Personalization
B2B marketing will reach new levels of personalization in 2019. Whether multi channel or omni channel marketing, it really doesn’t matter. Modern marketers are more focused towards one-to-one personalization scale.
It’s definitely will be a pitfall if you fail to leverage the Intel and data that your audience provides. Your B2B buyers want to feel privileged and giving a personal touch is the way.Whether emails, landing pages, advertisements or content recommendations, personalization is no more confined to the business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing landscape.
Adopt a segmented and tailored approach in your experiences to make your audience feel recognized, understood and above all feel special.
Voice Search
2018 was all about the AI induced personal voice assistants Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google Home and their popularity has rubbed onto B2B marketing too. Marketers must be prepared to adjust their search engine optimization (SEO) approach to induce voice search. For the ease of discoverability on search, you need to move past the common keyword placement and tread into the zone of conversational content, formatted to be easily comprehended by machines.
Though voice search is still in its fledgling phase, yet based on what has been published and industry experts’ opinion, there are high chances of it to outdo the mobile search in the next five years. Well, in that case this is a trend you cannot ignore and would want to get an early start on.
Artificial intelligence
One of the many methods that marketers are embracing to address customer experience is seeking the help from artificial intelligence (AI). Chatbots have
grown in number in customer service but they are just one variation of AI for marketers.
Programmatic advertising marketplaces are integrating AI into their ad buying techniques more than ever, connecting publishers and advertisers more efficiently with speed and accuracy, and at a price point that’s already pre-set within the system.
AI is yet at its nascent phase from the content point, from the standpoint of actual production. It can though assist in deciphering structured data sets and pull out key insights through machine learning. However, the catch lies in converting that raw information into organic content, which would be rather difficult.
LinkedIn crowds out other social channels
Over 50% of overall B2B social traffic is from LinkedIn and even 80% of leads are derived from LinkedIn.
It’s clear that LinkedIn reigns the distribution channel list of social media platform, a publishing platform and a referral network. LinkedIn has gained impetus to the extent that B2B marketers are not sure anymore to whether it’s even worth of their time to allocate resources toward other channels such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
To summarize, as you look to execute your 2019 plans, keep these marketing trends at the top of the mind. There’s no stopping for marketers from experimenting, however. And of course rightfully so.
Recent Comments